"It's not too late to stay organized in 2011" Giveaway!

So I thought all the weekly planners were dealt with, but I had a sold one returned which was undeliverable and the buyer no longer wants it. So I'm going to give it away to some lucky blog reader or Facebook fan, yay! Here's how you can get your name into a random draw for this weekly planner: Tell me what you think of the new product photos in my Etsy shop. Leave your feedback as a comment either 1. Here on my blog or 2. On my Facebook page Also be sure to leave enough information so that I can contact you if you win. I'll do the random draw on February 14th - this is the planner that you could win! This weekly planner has a wrap-around leather cover and is bound using a longstitch sewing, visible on the spine. The wrap-around cover is soft honey yellow cowhide leather. There is a leather strap to wrap around. Book size is about 6¼" x 3¾" (or 16cm x 9.5cm). This book contains: * a 2011 calendar with a 2-page spread for each week * other standard pages for personal info, phone numbers, conversion charts, important dates, 2011 & 2012 at a glance, reference maps, etc. * a set of pocket pages at the back * lots of blank pages for notes * an attached ribbon bookmark --> Comments for this Giveaway are now closed - winner will be announced shortly!

Girdle Books

A couple of my Girdle Book replicas...

Brown paper bags

We use way too much of everything and throw away most of it. So I try to find a use for some of that stuff that normally gets tossed aside. One of the things I have been saving is paper bags.


I also save the board from the back of sketchbooks, so I combined that with the paper bags and made some little notebooks with a chain stitch binding.


They are a million miles from archival, I know that; but, they are just notebooks for scribbling grocery lists or other simple things and I don't think they need to outlive me!

Here's a shot of the spines - as requested!

Girdle Books

Another project that I was working on in the last few months, was making a few more Girdle Book journals. I have made some before and each time, I tweak the process a bit. As always with the girdle books that I make, I'm not technically binding these like they would have been done historically - I'm playing the 'artistic license card' with a lot of the details. You can read a bit more about this structure in an earlier post. This time I sewed my own endbands which, I think, is a nice touch. This is how it looks after the text blocks are ready with endbands completed.


Some of them looked better than others in the end, here are a couple of the better ones up close.


I wanted to use my own marbled papers for the endpapers too so the endbands were made to coordinated with them.



I used leather for the coverings and added either metal corners or raised bands and each one has a clasp.

New Year's Resolution and Tea-stained Paper

Happy New Year to all my blog readers! I have just decided that my New Year's Resolution is to post more regularly here on my blog - no less than once per week. I used to be able to manage a weekly post but last year was slack; so, I resolve to do better this year!

I'll try to catch up by posting some things that I meant to post last year. There were several projects where I took pictures with the intention of sharing them here on the blog - but never got around to it. One such project was my first attempt at tea-staining paper - the results were quite good. I realize that introducing tea will make the paper non-archival but I wanted some old-looking paper and this seemed the best way to achieve the effect.


This is how I did it...

I made some strong tea and put it in a shallow pan. I crumpled the pages and tossed them into the tea. I did not fully submerge the paper.


I removed the papers, flattened them a bit, and laid them out to dry.


When they were all dry, I had a stack of paper like this,


Which I put into the press, and got this:


I used this paper to make some thick signatures - here they are on top of some regular signatures made from the same paper (unstained).


I used the thick sections to make some journals in the style of the Nag Hammadi books. I've discussed this book style before so you can read more about the history in some of my earlier posts.

One of these with the stained paper was included in the December BEST book swap and another is pictured here. I think the old-looking paper was exactly right for these journals.


If you have any suggestions for improvements to my tea-staining process, please leave a comment and tell me about it.

Merry Christmas

The stockings are hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that St Nicholas soon will be here!

Merry Christmas to all my blog readers. In spite of the long absences from my blog, I have been continuing to make books and have been very busy during the past few weeks with local craft markets and working on orders. In January, I hope to start working on more projects that I want to work on, rather than just orders from other people. That should give me more interesting work to share here on my blog.

I had a chance to make a Christmas book for my mother this year; she needed a guestbook for an event she was hosting. It is a hardcover book bound using a traditional Japanese stab binding. Some of my own marbled paper is used on the covers with a little Christmas tree image inset on the front.



Happy Holidays to everyone and best wishes for a fabulous year in 2011.

Local Events - Dec 4 & 5

If you are in my area (which is Halifax, Nova Scotia), you should know about these events! MyHandboundBooks will be present at both, this weekend. Come by and visit. The two events are within spitting distance of each other (sorta), so you can easily do both!

12 Days of Christmas - Nov 22 to Dec 3

Until December 3rd, I am participating in the 12 Days of Christmas event in conjunction with the Trans Canada Etsy Street team! This means, that all purchases from my shop during these 12 days, will earn ballots into a draw for a really fabulous prize! I am also offering Free Shipping on almost everything! The ballots will earn you a chance to win a prize package of handmade goodies from TCET members and you can see the list of participating Etsy shops and the prizes by visiting our team blog. You can get one ballot without making a purchase if you share your letter to Santa. Visit the team blog each day for fun holiday stories, recipes, pictures and more about each of the team members, as we count down the 12 Days of Christmas together.

Woodblock Letterpress printing - 4

Our final woodblock letterpress class at the Dawson Printshop was a couple weeks ago and I never finished my blog posts to show the final results! Better late than never. I was using the Kelsey parlor press to make notebook covers. I printed them in two colours, first "My Analog" in dark brown then "Blog" in dark red. Another night, I was waiting to use the proof press and passed the time by using the parlor press again, printing a few more notebook covers that have a silver "ME" on them. I really like this font. The final project that I did in class was assembling and printing this collage of many woodblock fonts. It is just a jumble, don't try to make it say anything clever, it is just letters A to Z and numbers 1 to 9 and a few punctuation blocks, arranged on the bed and printed all in one colour. I might use these as decorative papers in bookbinding; that's the plan right now, although I haven't done anything with them yet. Thanks Niko, for a great introduction to letterpress!

My first pop-up book

This is my first attempt at making a pop-up book. I didn't attempt any amazing pop-up structures; I just attached my trees to little pop-up squares made with two cuts on the fold.

I've submitted this book as part of a BEST challenge so you can vote for it if you like it! Or vote for whichever you like best - by visiting the BEST blog. There are some really great entries in the challenge this year.


So, this is a Time for Patience. A handmade pop-up book to celebrate the procrastination innate in leaf raking. No sense starting until every leaf has fallen.

It is a 2-page pop up. So the first pop-up spread is a tree, barren of leaves, except for one at the top.


The second spread is a wider scene of that same tree and a couple others, with the rake and the raker and the fallen leaves, all waiting patiently for that last leaf to fall.


I also collected a few leaves and made some rubbings which are used on the covers of the book. Leather spine.

Gaspereau Press Wayzgoose

As I mentioned in the last post, I dragged my family to Kentville on Saturday to an open house at Gaspereau Press for their annual Wayzgoose. They also had other activities throughout the weekend like printing demonstrations, presentations, bookbinding workshops etc. I only made it to the open house. This is the first year that I have attended and they have been doing it for 11 years; maybe next year I'll get down to more of the events.

One thing I hadn't seen before, was this handy machinery that cast lead type in an instant. This is Andrew Steeves making a lead cast of my son's name - the whole process took only a minute and the lead was cool enough to hold when it came sliding out the front.


I also came away with a bundle of posters that were printed during the open house. Shown here top left, the BlUNT poster letterpress printed on a Vandercook proof press, then top right, a sample of some offset printing for the quotation from Henry David Thoreau. Bottom left, is the letterpress poster that Nicholas and Amos printed on another Vandercook proof press, and bottom right, a couple little cards printed on a parlor press using the lead cast that Andrew made a few minutes previously.


They also have an offcut paper sale, where you can buy offcuts of nice paper, and it's cheap. So of course, I brought home some paper too - bonus.

Visiting Letterpress Artist - Amos Paul Kennedy Jr

Amos Paul Kennedy Jr is a letterpress artist from Alabama. He has been visiting Halifax this month with his work exhibited in one of the NSCAD galleries coinciding with the recent city-wide "Nocturne" art event. He also presented a couple of public talks and attended some classes at NSCAD as a guest artist and teacher.

There is a gallery of some of his work on his website (www.kennedyprints.com). He designs and prints some terrific posters, including a great series on the virtues of coffee. Many of his posters are very clever and entertaining but many are also very serious in their message, dealing with a wide range of issues like racisim, civil rights, ecomonics, artistic freedom, etc. Apparently he served in the Peace Corps and also studied and worked as a computer programmer in previous lives, but left that behind to pursue the creative life of a letterpress artist. There is a very good article about him on the Daily Mountain Eagle website.

His visit to Halifax also happen to coincide with my last letterpress class earlier this week. He visited our class so it was nice to meet him and have a chance to talk to him a bit. And I saw him again today at the Gaspereau Press Wayzgoose where he was demonstrating one of their Vandercook proof presses and helping people print souvenir posters. I had packed up the whole family to go to the Wayzgoose, so my son got to print the souvenir poster - with some help from Amos.

Woodblock Letterpress printing - 3

Someone mentioned that I never showed a picture of those Christmas cards after printing the second colour. "Merry" was printed first in black, then "Christmas" was printed on top in silver. So here's how they turned out - some were printed on red and some on white...obviously.


After those were done, I started another project using a different kind of press. Here is one of the Dawson Printshop's parlor presses, all inked up with red right now.


This is a Kelsey parlour press; it is a table top press and it is entirely manual. Using this was much different than the comparably gigantic proof press that I was using before. Niko was explaining to me that these small parlor presses were really common in Victorian times when printing was a popular hobby and people just wanted to have one in their home, and of course they kept it in the parlor. So I used this press to print a cover for a notebook. I printed the second colour on them last night so now they are just drying and I'll make them into notebooks and show off a finished one here soon. We have one class left - I've already started something to keep me busy during those last three hours.

Autumn Leaves

This is my Autumn Leaves / Autumn Memories journal that I made for the current TCET Challenge! That's a photo of my kid a couple years ago, buried in a pile of fallen leaves. Drop by the TCET blog to vote for your favorite handmade item. Also, if you have an idea that you think our team should use for our next challenge, leave a comment and we might pick your idea! Go here to vote: transcanadaetsyteam.blogspot.com

Morgan Conservatory Open House and Auction - Today!

The Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory and Educational Foundation is an Ohio non-profit art centre dedicated to the preservation of handmade papermaking and the art of the book. I have met some of the key persons involved in the centre through my attendance at PBI in previous years. For its third year, The Morgan is having their annual Open House and Auction, today, October 2 from 6 to 10pm. So if you are in the Cleveland area, check it out at 1754 East 47th Street.

The silent auction will raise funds for The Morgan and its programs. Many of the auction items are made with, from, on, or otherwise featuring handmade kozo paper, made on site. There are also many other art objects for auction as well. Many well known artists, paper makers, and book artists are involved in this event and have made the items for the auction. And some not as well known - in fact, this leather journal, by me, is one of the items available (I didn't have any of their kozo paper to use). It features a full leather cover with an abstract floral detail, with marbled endpapers (marbled by me). Pages are Mohawk Superfine cream.